The Grey Lady
by Nalia-R
Summary: You don't have to be the Chosen One to change the world. Little Hermione Granger discovers the magical world years before her letter comes...and that changes everything. Harem, mature content down the line, powerful Hermione
1. Prologue

It had always been known to Hermione Granger that she may be just a bit smarter than those around her.

Maybe it came from one of her earliest memories at the tender age of two, when she had been caught perusing through one of the old literary journals her father had left lying about. He'd snatched it out of her tiny fingers, afraid that she'd do what most toddlers would have done and started tearing out the pages once she'd gotten bored. She'd reached for it to grab it back, yes, but only because the review on a famous author's new thriller had been more interesting than the kids' show with the colorful character playing on the telly.

Maybe it came from when she was five years old, and already doing long division when most of her kindergarten acquaintances were still learning their numbers. Not their fault, of course, but she did feel a bit under stimulated.

However, how much smarter she was didn't quite matter. Because when Hermione Granger was eight years old, she realized that all the strange happenings that had always surrounded her was because she could do magic.

Real magic even, she mused, not like the magician who had made fake flowers appear at her last birthday party. Magic that could do things. Magic that she could control. Magic that defied the very laws of nature as she knew them.

She knew this because she, on a bit of a whim, looked a robins feather on the asphalt outside of her front door and wondered if only it could float. Then it did.

Now, she was sitting on the front stoop, bony elbows digging into her thighs and chin in her hands as her dark brown eyes stared at the robin's feather, trying to make it float again. One of her books had told her that a true scientist repeatedly tested a hypothesis to make sure their results were consistent. Though she was reasonably sure she'd done magic, it did hurt to see if it had just been an extraordinarily convenient gust of wind.

Concentrate, she thought to herself, just concentrate.

The robin's feather on the asphalt seemed to mock her. It sensed her intent, perhaps, and decided to mock her. It sat largely unmoving in front of her.

However, Hermione was determined.

After a few more minutes of just staring, she thought back to another piece of information she'd learned in a book. Those who repeated the same thing over and over and expecting different results were insane. Obviously, just concentrating wasn't the answer.

Was it just wishing? No, she was pretty sure that was out, she'd definitely been wishing this entire time, which left wanting out of the question as well. She'd also wanted the feather to float the first time it happened, so what was missing?

Hermione closed her eyes and thought back, conjuring what she had felt just fifteen minutes ago. She'd looked at the feather, and she had wished...

And felt the wish fill her, like air in a balloon. A familiar feeling, she thought, one that had also appeared when one of the kids who bullied her at school tripped over his laces when chasing after her one day, or when she found a pound in her pocket when passing by a deliciously forbidden sweets store.

Magic, Hermione thought, and she'd never even realized it until today.

She opened her eyes and wished, and felt that air fill her till almost bursting. Since she was paying attention, she felt tendrils reach out of her and to the feather.

It rose.

And she smiled.

This was to be the beginning of an interesting adventure.

**Yes yes I realize I really should finish The Other Flower but I'm not as excited about that anymore, so I decided to go ahead with publishing something I am excited about. Next few chapters of his are already written, they just need a quick polish and then I'll try my best to adhere to some sort of schedule.**


	2. Discovery

**Another day, another chapter. To answer a concern raised on the prologue:**

**Yes, it is weird that a five year old was doing long division. That's the point. As far as I'm concerned, Hermione is a bit of a genius and a lot of a magical prodigy.**

Logic dictated that she couldn't be special.

After all, like every small child in the world, Hermione had grown up hearing about magic her entire life. Stories of witches and wizards, dragons and unicorns. It only made sense to her that there had to be other people in the world to inspire those kinds of stories, who could do what she did.

Now, all she had to do was to find them.

Hermione mulled over this task as she sat eating her oatmeal. Her parents, Adriana and Sebastian, were used to their daughter alternating between chattering their ears off and sitting as quietly as she was in that moment, though her father noticed this time that there was a particular sort of intensity about her.

Sebastian watched as his daughter's eyebrows furrowed as she absentmindedly shoveled down scoops of oatmeal and worried for her. He knew that some of the kids had been picking on her at school. It had been the same for him and his wife as well. Smart kids were usually some of the ones at the bottom of the pecking order. The ones who were so clearly marked as different but in such a way that made others feel insecure.

To quote his grandfather, there would always be the weak who wanted to be strong, and if they could not build themselves up, they would take others down.

He looked up to his wife across the table, and she met his eyes with a look of her own. They'd been thinking about possibly taking Hermione out to homeschool her and let her learn at her own pace, but they felt they couldn't risk their daughter's social skills being stunted.

"Hermione, you ready to go to school love?" Adriana asked with a barely repressed sigh. Her daughter was always either suffering or bored at school, and she hated to send her. Maybe they'd consider moving her ahead a grade or two once she was a bit older.

"Yes, mum," Hermione said obediently, scooping the last few bites of oatmeal into her mouth before getting up to run and grab her bag.

Once they dropped her off in front of the building, Hermione watched until her parent's car disappeared around the corner. Then she took the note out that she'd forged in their name. It honestly wasn't much work to blend into the general rush of students and stray parents and make her way to the main office.

She stood for a bit in the back corner of the office packed with parents and nannies, next to a distracted couple that looked vaguely enough like her she thought she probably wouldn't attract too much attention.

Hermione held the note in her hand and conjured that balloon feeling as she stared at the little basket on the front desk that held all of the absence notes. Hers specifically said that she was going to go for outside of school tutoring for a couple of days, an event that was thankfully common enough that she didn't think anyone would be suspicious.

She'd practiced this already multiple times the night before, and though it hadn't been a hundred percent success rate (sometimes the note landed a foot or so to the side) it was enough that she felt confident.

There was a barely audible pop as the note disappeared from her hand and appeared in the basket. She smiled, satisfied with herself, and made her way out of the phone, making sure to walk back towards the car line still dropping off kids as if she had forgotten something.

Thing is, Hermione disappeared behind some trees and just kept walking. She smiled again to herself. It was time to get to work.

Now, if she were an entire magical world, Hermione mused, where would she be hiding?

She'd found herself in a public library a few blocks down from her school, close enough to dash back just in time for pick up when it came around. In front of her were several books of maps, some showing her general region, some of England, some of the world at large.

The problem was, she didn't know exactly what she should be looking for. Did the magicals live in the regular neighborhoods, hiding their magicalness except when they wanted to make their tea kettles dance at night? Or maybe did they all live on some fantastic island somewhere, with beautiful oceans and gleaming dragons? She assumed they were all over the world since every culture she'd ever read about had some kind of folklore about magic, but that really didn't narrow down her options now did it?

Moreover, and it was a question that had been nagging at her for a while, did they know about _her_? If it weren't for the fact that she was the spitting image of her mum, she may have believed that maybe she was the long-lost daughter of magical parents. Hermione also absolutely knew for sure that her parents were not magic. So, if she continued on her path of logic that she was not unique, that meant there had to be other children like her, who had been born magic to normal parents.

She knew the magic world would have kept themselves hidden because there was a general belief that magic wasn't real. Those other kids, they must have also found out they had magic somehow, but there wasn't anything that she had heard of with parents legitimately claiming their kid was magic, or any adults saying that that was their experience.

So, _that_ meant that at some point those kids had found out about their magic, and were either killed to keep the secret (she shuddered to think about it), or they were taught to shut up about it.

_Someone_ had to teach them to shut up about it. Someone who _knew _about magic, and the magical world. She was not unique, so that meant that at some point in her life, someone was going to come for her too. That someone, or someone's, would have to know it was her performing magic as well. What if they tracked her? What if someone was watching her _right that moment_?

The idea gave her chills, but also a bit of a thrill. It was practically assured then, that at some point someone would come for her. But what if they wanted to kill her to keep her quiet? She would have to learn how to protect herself, and her family. More than that, she wanted to know everything right now and didn't feel like waiting. The thought that there was an entire magical world, waiting for her, wasn't something that she could sit still for. She wanted to know about it right then and learn everything about magic that she possibly could.

Unfortunately, her search of the maps for the day had turned up with absolutely nothing and it was getting to be about time for her parents to pick her up from school. Hermione reluctantly put the books back on the shelves and slipped out of the library to head back. She was going to have a lot of research to do.

It was another several weeks before Hermione had her first big success.

She'd quickly abandoned just using maps as a base for her research and moved on to mining news articles about unusual events that had taken place. Rainstorms over a single neighborhood, men turning into bears in bars, those sorts of things. Most of these stories weren't main page news, just little asides, not more than a few sentences. Funny little stories meant to distract from some bit of depressing news about a kidnapped child or a bank robbery. Whoever wrote them always kept a light and humorous tone, as if it were ridiculous to believe any of this could really happen.

One interesting thing that she'd found was a virulent spate of unusual occurrences that had happened some years ago when she was only two, unusual showers of shooting stars and owls filling the sky, all over the span of about a week, before it was abruptly put to an end. It had gone on all over England, but there were a few places that they seemed particularly centered in.

One was a spot in London on an otherwise unremarkable street, where there'd been three separate events of fireworks going off. They'd emitted no heat and no one was able to tell where they had come from.

Another was thankfully a bit closer, a strip mall not too far from the library that she sat in now. A woman reported seeing a dancing half man half shark, and another a talking beaver. It seemed just as good a place to start as any.

She'd already turned in yet another note from her 'parents' saying she was taking another few days off for additional tutoring. It seemed as though her teacher couldn't care less. Hermione was so obviously advanced ahead of the other children that her teacher actually seemed glad to have her out of the classroom. Whenever Hermione came back she'd taken to asking her what she'd learned, so she made sure to smuggle out a couple of books for older kids and just quote whatever she'd learned from them. The smuggling was made easier by a magical trick she'd taught herself, where she'd shrink the books by touching them and making them float into her pocket.

Now she was in the library, having just finished carefully copying a map of the local area to take with her if she got lost, and also to mark any observations she had about the area. Her school uniform was off, and she was wearing the most normal clothes she possibly could to blend in while walking down the streets so no adults would stop her. She'd learned the best way to avoid any question was just to walk like she knew where she was going, so she'd practiced the route several times in her head already.

Hermione was ready to enter the magical world.

Stepping out of the library, she took a right instead of a left. It wasn't long before she arrived. The strip mall, called Rolling Acres, wasn't much to look at, though she supposed that was the magicals point. It had a bookstore, a couple of clothing stores, a little boutique, and some weird fish marketplace.

She looked at each in turn. She'd gone to the bookstore a million times with her parents and had never noticed anything off about it. Same with the clothing stores, and so many people went in and out of the boutique, she was sure someone would say something if there was some sort of portal there.

The fish market was sandwiched right in the middle of the two clothing stores and never seemed to have any business. That's why Hermione noticed the funnily dressed man who was heading right towards it.

He was a tall man, with rounded shoulders and scraggly brown hair. He seemed to be wearing bright purple pajamas, but no one seemed to notice him even as he walked straight through the door to the fish market.

Bingo.

Hermione immediately trotted after him, and she noticed that when she started walking to the fish market people seemed to stop noticing her as well. Maybe they thought she was the man's daughter?

She pushed her way through the store front door and what she saw...wasn't a fish market.

Instead, it seemed to be just a wall with a single elevator. The man had disappeared completely, and the elevator only had a single plain button on the outside, not even anything to indicate whether she wanted to go up or down.

Hermione stepped forward and stared at the button. Would the magicals really use an _elevator _to get into their world? She left her magic raise in her in the way she was so used to having it do and put her hand over the button. It seemed to tingle in a way that reminded her in some way of the first time she made the feather float.

A gentle push and the elevator door opened. She stepped inside to look around, and the door immediately closed. There, next to the door, was again a single button. This one seemed to tingle with even greater magic.

There were no numbers on it, nothing. For a moment Hermione hesitated. What if this was some sort of defunct elevator? What if it was broken and she was trapped and her parents had to come get her and realized all the things their only eight-year-old daughter had done?

But Hermione, she wouldn't call herself brave per say, but she wanted things. She wanted magic, and if she had to do some dumb things to get it then well, that would just be the price wouldn't it? Too late to go back now.

Another gentle push. For a moment there was nothing, and Hermione felt a heaping dose of disappointment. Back to the drawing board she gue-

Then the elevator went sideways.

And backdoors that definitely hadn't been back there before opened.

And...

And...

Good lord.

It was _amazing._

Before her stretched a scene that she was definitely sure did not exist in the rest of Surrey. It looked like a small little village, with cottages and the like. A bit further in were a collection of shops, and if it weren't for the fact that they were definitely in the middle of the country when she had just been in a suburb, nothing about the view was anything out of the ordinary.

Except for the fact that this place was absolutely, undeniably, magical.

Hermione watched as little kids a bit younger than her flew on little brooms close to the ground, and a woman who sat on her front porch, knitting while floating above her another pair of knitting needles clacked in time.

A man passing by waved what looked like a _wand _and the time popped up in the air in front of him, casual as could be. Another passed by with a book about dragons, and yet another with one on something called transfiguration.

More than all of that, the air was filled with something that at this point she had determined was the feeling of magic. It seemed to sing to her, to fill her, to entice her.

This is where Hermione belonged. This was her birthright. She didn't know if she'd ever be able to go back to her little ordinary house in her ordinary neighborhood and ever feel the same way again.

She set off towards the shops, trying to keep her gawking to glances out of the sides of her eyes. There were already a fair few people eyeing her, but since there were a few others dressed like she was instead of the pajamas, she figured it had less to do with how she appeared and more about how there was a small unfamiliar girl in their midst.

The town, if she could call it that, was very small. Basically just a smattering of homes, maybe a few more than the ones in her own neighborhood, and a collection of shops she was headed to at the moment that seemed to function as their 'downtown'. Hermione could see that many had added personal touches to their home that could only be explained by magic. For example, she didn't think she'd ever seen a doorbell that looked like a real, live lion head.

Upon reaching the downtown, Hermione stopped. There was a furniture shop, a type of small grocery, an apothecary, a bank, and a few others.

However, Hermione was true to her nature and one shop intrigued her beyond all the rest. The bookstore.

Like a shining beacon, it stood out to her beyond all of the rest. A simple little thing, no bigger than a coffee shop, but on the storefront, it held the words _Browns Bookshop _in shining golden letters. Hermione walked up to the front door and pressed against it even more hesistantly than she had the elevator button. Above her, a delicate bell jingled.

By her first step she was enveloped by the familiar heavy scent of paper and ink, but for once that wasn't what took her breath away. No, the inside of this shop was absolutely huge, easily ten times what the outside would have indicated in every direction. She had to crane her neck to see the ceiling, and even then the massively tall stacks of books seemed to stretch on forever.

Magic was the obvious answer. It was the answer that described everything she had seen so far, from the elevator concealing a town to the lion doorbell. It was seeing this that made her ask how? What was it about magic that separated her floating a feather from a child flying on a broom? Hermione suspected that her answers would be hiding in these books.

"May I help you young miss?"

An older woman came stepping out of the aisles to the side, a stack of books bobbing merrily behind her. Hermione brushed her hands off with her skirt and closed her gaping mouth.

"No ma'am, I was just hoping to look through the stacks a bit."

The woman eyed her. She had long curly hair not unlike Hermione's, although it was snow white and well tamed. Her face was not aged like her hair would suggest, and her skin was of the deepest bronze with pitch black eyes.

"What's your name, girl?" she asked. Hermione froze for a moment, unsure if she should tell the truth. Determining it may just cause more problems later on, she answered truthfully.

"Hermione Granger, ma'am."

"Like the Dagworth Grangers?"

"Yes, ma'am." Well, one lie wouldn't be too bad.

"And a halfblood then?"

"Yes, ma'am." Okay, a couple lies wouldn't be much worse. Although she was entirely sure what a halfblood even was.

The woman hummed and looked her up and down. Hermione, who had a decent amount of practice hiding her true emotions from bullies so they would get bored and move on, didn't even blink. Instead she concealed her nerves and let her eyes roam hungrily over the rows of books on the shelves. She saw one about transfiguration, like the one the man had been carrying earlier. She was hoping she could find out what it was all about.

"Have your parents approved you asking about the listing?" The woman asked.

Hermione almost started. That definitely had not been a question that she had been expecting.

"Yes ma'am. Only if it didn't interfere with, um, my schooling though."

The woman waved her off. "Yes yes of course. My mum was quite the same don't you worry. Hogwarts was easy compared to her. I'm Mrs. Dorne of course, the owner."

Upon seeing Hermione's open look of confusion from seeing the name on the store front, she chuckled. "Brown was my maiden name of course. Of the Noble House of Brown so you know. The family wasn't wont to give up a single business of theirs, they weren't. Now you'll be given a galleon of week, of course, and if you're good I'll give you access to the books. You'll have to bring them back, mind..."

Mrs. Dorne started off down the aisles, Hermione and floating books in tow, tattering on about how the shop worked while sprinkling in random anecdotes about her life and the annoying customers who came in. Despite Mrs. Dorne saying she wouldn't get any books until she proved herself, the woman still saw fit to grant her with a nice stack of eight. The woman's glances towards her arms told her the woman was partially just trying to gauge her strength, but if there was anything Hermione was used to lifting it was stacks of books.

By the time she got back to the elevator, shrunken books tucked away in her pocket, Hermione felt satisfied. Finally, _finally, _she had found her way to the magical world.


End file.
